<p>The best way to improve your Critical Reading is by reading the NY times, or ure local newspaper. The op-eds and editorials are really helpful, because tones and good vocabulary are used. Anyone agree? Comments please.</p>
<p>Good idea for a general education, but if people are in a hurry and aiming specifically for a high SAT score maybe they should focus on specific SAT vocab. After taking practice verbal tests I made lists of all the vocab in the answer choices that I could not easily define and went from there.</p>
<p>i got an 800 on the CR and i prepared in no special way but taking practice tests</p>
<p>all of the answers are somewhere in the paragraph and its always the most obvious answer</p>
<p>it truly bothers me that people feel studying vocab is the way to go</p>
<p>its the worst thing to do, it wastes time and is fairly impossible to understand all the words</p>
<p>you have to develop the skill of eliminating answer choices and figuring out what the word means based on the root</p>
<p>Try the Economist</p>
<p>yepd has a good point</p>
<p>Sometimes, I don't even know what a word means, but I just know if its positive or negative and I guess by that (education guessing)</p>
<p>Or I eleminate all the meanings I do know and then go from there</p>
<p>But, then again, I took many practice tests and studied Word Smart to get my 780, so just being good at guessing is only a part of it</p>
<p>I'll take a crack. If you mean "improve your critical reading score on the SAT", then the statement has no merit whatsoever (i.e., it is a naive and somewhat uneducated statement). If you mean "increase your critical reading" abilities in general, I'll leave that argument to those that regularly read the Washington Post and other somewhat sophisticated newspapers. If you want to seriously increase your critical reading score on the SAT, there are plenty of posts on this website that tell you how to do so. Consider: I asked a young Chinese busness school professor how he was able to get a full scholarship to the Ph.D. program at U Texas. He said: "I knew what it took on the standardized test (the GMAT and GRE in this case). I could easily score in the upper 99th percentile on math. However, I could not speak any English - I mean absolutely no English. In fact, I had never met anyone born in the US or Britain. I memorized 6500 vocabulary words and 2000 sample writing and verbal questions over a 6 month period. I scored in the 93rd percentile on verbal skillls. When I arrived in Austin, Texas, I could still not "speak" English or even read the local newspaper. Needless to say, I learned very fast". By the way, students now rank this professor as one of the very best teachers in his university. So, don't waste your time reading the NY Times if you are doing so just to raise your SAT, there are "more efficient"' ways to do that. Do so because it is one of the best newspapers in the world.</p>